Inspector O 04 - The Man with the Baltic Stare (35 page)

“One of those snappy four-character sayings, right?” ’

“You think I’m joking? Try listening to a symphony sometime. You can’t do anything like that with a book, not even close. The same goes for a painting. Sure, it gets done one brushstroke
at a time, that’s how it’s painted, but I’m talking about the effect. You stand back, what do you see? Brushstrokes? No, you see a painting. You follow?”

“I got your point.”

“No, you didn’t. You think I’m spouting theory.” Zhao’s eyes followed me as I edged along the wall. “But this is reality we’re talking about. Books aren’t real; that’s what I’m telling you. Words are never real. If I say, ‘I shot you,’ what the fuck do you care? But if I put a bullet in your heart, that’s real. Am I right?”

“I suppose.” Standing still might help. Maybe he couldn’t really see me but tracked movement like a bat or a shark.

“You better suppose. A bullet in your heart—that’s an image. Words aren’t even that. Words are words. And books are what? Words. I’ll say it again. You can’t get faster, or slower, or louder, or softer. Here’s a word. Here’s another word. It’s like throwing fish to a seal.”

The elevator door must have opened. I couldn’t hear it, but there was something new—a change in air pressure, or maybe the faint whip of a viper’s tongue. I pressed myself so far against the wall that the paint squeaked.

“Breathe normally,” Zhao laughed. It wasn’t the sound of anything this side of hell. “Just relax and close your eyes.”

No, I wasn’t going to do that. Kim said I couldn’t stop the flow of history. Maybe not, but I could make sure Zhao wouldn’t be part of it.

“Inspector? It won’t be long now. Give Pang my regards when you see him.”

A light went on, a bright orange light that made the whole room look like the middle of a burning city. I turned my head and there, standing a meter away, was Zhao’s number three, the
pupils of his orange eyes as big as saucers. He was holding a saw, not for wood but for cutting through bone. His mouth opened. I fired twice. Then there was a third shot, a fourth. The viper wasn’t moving, I had my finger off the trigger, but there was still one more shot, very loud considering it was a room full of books. If Zhao was trying to shoot me in the back, he was taking his sweet time about it.

The room became supremely still for a moment. I turned around, and there was Zhao. He was sitting back in his leather chair, only I wouldn’t say it was a fighting posture or even one to show how relaxed he was. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t seeing any words. He wasn’t seeing anything. Greta stood off to his right, a pistol at her side.

“That’s done,” she said. “You all right?”

“Me? I’m fine. Did Zhao even know you were there?”

“I doubt it. Did you?” She walked over to the elevator. “Let’s get out of here.” She tossed me a book of matches. “You want to burn down the building?”

The thought never crossed my mind. “No, I think we’ll call things even at this point. Are we leaving the bodies here like this?”

“Let Major Kim deal with it.”

When we got down to the lobby, the lady at the desk was skimming a magazine. She flipped the pages as we walked by. Out on the street, Greta looked up at the top floor. “That orange light is still on. I hope it fries his eyes out.” She turned to me. “You hungry? We can get some
mandu
now. I’ll call Kang from the restaurant.”

“One thing I don’t understand.” A plate of dumplings sat in front of me, barely touched. I had discovered that near-death experiences did not whet my appetite. Greta didn’t seem to have
that problem. “I know why the young man wanted that room—so he could see the fort. And I know someone standing along the front of the fort could see his room. But for what?”

She took a small light from her pocket. “It’s got a powerful beam, very concentrated.” She clicked it on once, twice, three times. “That’s it. Three times. That was all he needed to be sure that we were waiting for him. All he had to do was click his light once to show me he was there. I waited in the fort every night, but there was nothing.”

“Why was the message so crucial? Why didn’t you arrange for him to go to the window and send his signal when he arrived?”

“We didn’t know for sure we’d make it on the first day. And we had to make sure that someone else didn’t see the light and report it to the police. The message was from a song we used to sing when he was a child. He and I were cousins.”

Something creaked in my memory, a rusty hinge too old to repair. What had Luís told me? Maybe the young man had been standing at the window to signal a long-lost relative. Luís actually had said that. And I had dismissed it as Macanese sarcasm. What did I know about Macanese sarcasm?

Greta looked at the
mandu
on my plate. “Are you going to eat that?”

“I liked it better when we were having pastry. Go on.” I pushed the dish to her side of the table. “You were telling me about the family ties.”

“I was with him a lot when he was growing up. Later, I went away to school in Europe and decided not to come home.”

“That’s where you met Kang.”

“He said I was about the same age his daughter was when they took her away. You were there that night, Inspector. You saw what happened.”

“I only saw the aftermath, the furniture wrecked, the flowers she put on the tables scattered across the floor.” I didn’t mention
the book in French, facedown as if she’d placed it carefully on the counter when they crashed through the door. “One thing I still can’t figure out. Why did he invite Tanya to his room?”

“Maybe he didn’t. Maybe Tanya just knocked on his door. I think the whole story about him inviting a prostitute to his room, having dinner, the whole thing is a lie, part of the effort to destroy his image.”

“There are receipts in his handwriting for the room service charge.”

“There are a hundred ways to forge a receipt. Zhao probably owned a string of print shops that turned out phony receipts. No one pays attention when signing those things anyway. The signatures all look like four-year-olds did them. They’re easy to forge.”

“You don’t think we know what happened that night. Neither do I.”

She helped herself to one of my
mandu.

“I don’t think we’ll ever know.”

“Everything is coming apart at the same time, Kang, all at once. It’s exactly like the hotel. Boom! And anything left standing is only there by inertia.”

“That’s how it might look to some people.”

“You don’t think so?”

“Things appear; then they disappear. That’s how the universe does its business, Inspector. Evolutionary change is a nice idea, but it isn’t the way the world works itself into a new order. I wouldn’t let it upset me. That’s why people age; they worry about things they have no control over.”

“I take it you think you have a place in the new order.”

“No, I don’t know. Unless what we’re talking about is chaos. For that, we both have a reserved seat.”

“You expect Kim to stay and fight?”

“He and his friends will fry all of us if we let them. So, we don’t let them.”

“You really think you’re going to defeat the whole South Korean army? They’ll pour across the border. We’ll be up to our necks in troops and bureaucrats and religious zealots and helping hands.”

“We have ways.”

“When you left, did you think you’d be back?”

“I left behind what existed then. But this is now, and we’re going to shape what comes next.”

“That’s what people always think. That’s what they thought the last time. That’s what they’ll think the next time.”

“It’s a wheel; it goes around.”

“You’re going to ask me to join?”

“No. It was considered but rejected.”

Because it was so late in the year and I had nowhere to go, Kang arranged for me to stay in an apartment near his until the spring. By late April, I had returned to the mountain, in a truck with a load of lumber and a small box of tools. The new house took more than three months to build. It was smaller than the old one, darker on cloudy days, though the window faced south this time, not east, which meant there would be more sunlight in the winter. The army brought up another phone line; the new phone arrived a couple of weeks later. Kang called me a several times a week at first—to get my views, he said—but then there was less and less to say.

Soon after it was decided that I would move back to the mountain, I learned that my brother had died the year before, while I had been in Prague. Kang had known but had held off telling me. I made the trip to the cemetery in October, on the first anniversary of my brother’s death, and was surprised to meet a man, middle-aged, who was standing silently, his head bowed, in front of the marker.

The weather was perfect, the sky boundlessly high and blue. “A pleasant day,” I said when the man looked up and acknowledged my presence. “Did you know this person?”

“He was my father. And you?” The man studied my face closely.
“You are his brother; I can see it from the eyes. We have a picture of my great-grandfather at home. You both had his eyes.”

We shook hands, though I was too stunned to say much more than, “It is a pleasure to meet you.” When he asked if I lived nearby, I said merely that my home was outside of Pyongyang, several hours’ drive away. We left it at that.

As we walked together out of the cemetery, he put his hand on my arm. “I’m afraid I was not completely truthful with you. I am not his son, that is, not his real son.”

“How do you mean?”

“He never married my mother.” ’

“I see.” I pointed to a bench. “Why don’t we sit and enjoy the air for a few minutes. I’m sure no one here will mind.” Once we were seated, I spread my arms on the wooden rail and lifted my face to the sun. “If you don’t mind my asking, how old are you?”

“I am forty-nine. My father—your brother—was assigned to the border region in 1969, soon after the clashes. He did something that helped defuse the situation and he arranged for food to be brought to Koreans living on the Chinese side.”

“Your father told you this, I suppose.”

“No, he never mentioned these things. I heard them from other people. While he was there, he fell in love with a woman. Afterward, he came twice a year to see me and to give my mother support. We saw him every year until I was twenty. Then I went away to school, and it became more difficult.”

“Why would it be difficult? You were in Pyongyang, I imagine.”

“In Pyongyang? No, I was in Beijing.”

A breeze came down the hill and scattered the leaves that the groundskeepers had raked into a tidy pile. “Your mother, she is well?”

“She is.”

“And she lives where?”

“In Yanji.”

“Aha, I see. She is Korean?”

“Half-Korean, half-Chinese.”

I smiled, and then I laughed. It was a happy laugh, the sound of an old tree budding in the spring. “Some Chinese blood is a good thing,” I said. “Your great-grandmother had Chinese blood, did you know that?”

It was only days later, when I was back in my house, looking at the moon as it rose through the gap between the tall pine trees, that I realized the man at the grave was not just my brother’s son. He was my nephew and I his uncle.

That night, I dreamed of my grandfather and wondered even as I slept if he had dreamed of his grandfather, and he of his, and so on back in time. It was interesting, I thought to myself, that at the end we dream of the beginning.

Macau

2009